371947
submission
eggoeater writes:
AP and others are reporting about the backlash to a plan by the LAPD's counterterrorism bureau to "map" Muslims in and around LA.
From the article:
The LAPD's counterterrorism bureau plans to identify Muslim enclaves in order to determine which might be likely to become isolated and susceptible to "violent, ideologically based extremism," said Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing on Thursday.
"We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities," said Downing, who heads the counterterrorism bureau.
Understandably, the ACLU and many Muslim organizations are upset over this, but amazingly one organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, has offered to work with the LAPD on the project. I'm sure the federal government wouldn't dream of using this data in conjunction with other projects to track, er, I mean "map" Muslims.
306621
submission
281639
submission
chrysrobyn writes:
I find myself in the situation where I must store hundreds or possibly thousands of pieces of paper for later review and classification. I can't spend the time now to properly organize them (that definition may even change later anyway), or even seperate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I would like to feed it all to a sheet feeding scanner (I see them in Fry's for a few hundred dollars; some even come with free laser scanners), dump to PDF, then be able to reorder pages, drag pages to new PDF files, trash individual pages, etc. Duplicating a page would be a bonus. PDF is appealing because of the storage of the original sheet plus the OCR is generally good enough for searching.
Long story: My father in law passed away a few years ago, and he was the kind of guy who did everything on his own, at his own pace, and to nobody else's rules. Since his passing, my wife and I have wasted hundreds of hours (maybe more), trying to clean up and move on. Lawyers and a CPA have been involved, and without getting into the really long version, there is a whole lot we should really keep for our own purposes in the future (digital copies are okay, originals can be properly disposed of). Papers the professionals didn't require are vastly disorganized, occasionally sorted by year.
I don't do windows. Mac is preferred, but I personally have more experience with Linux. I've looked at DEVONthink, but it doesn't have the ability to trade pages between PDFs. I like Yep's tag feature, and can instantly come up with a dozen uses for that, but again, I can't organize an individual page somewhere. Adobe itself seems very intent on individual documents, not assisting with a database of them, or organizing between them.
Has the Slashdot audience seen anything like this?
266087
submission
qwerty writes:
A paper
at the upcoming academic conference
Automated Software Engineering
presents a new method to
detect code theft and could be used to detect GPL violations in
particular. While the co-called birthmarking method is demonstrated for
Java, it is general enough to work for other languages as well. The API
Benchmark observes the interaction between an application and (dynamic)
libraries that are part of the runtime system. This captures the
observable behavior of the program and cannot be easily foiled using
code obfuscation techniques,
as shown in the
paper. Once such a birthmark
is captured, it can be searched for in other programs. By capturing the
birthmarks from popular open-source frameworks, GPL-violating
applications could be identified.
266077
submission
RailGunSally writes:
I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *NIX systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore beancounter from Hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing "metrics" on absolutely everything from system utilization to paperclip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdotters: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?
265765
submission
kylus writes:
According to news.com, a 16 year old high school student cracked the Australian government's new porn filter. It apparently took only about 40 minutes for the student to crack the $84M filtering system. Just goes to show nothing will stop teenagers in the quest for porn!
